How the guide is made
Tel Aviv Chess collects the chess clubs, evenings, recurring events and lessons of Tel Aviv-Yafo and the Gush Dan towns, and ties each fact to a page anyone can open.
What gets a card
A club, bar, community centre, academy, coach, meetup or recurring event in Tel Aviv-Yafo or the surrounding towns gets a card when it has a name and at least one page that shows chess there. A hall that hosted one national championship, a single book-launch blitz or a club in a town outside the area does not.
No card is graded, ranked or endorsed, and none is paid for. Lists start with the place whose pages show the most recent chess.
Sources behind the cards
The backbone is the Israel Chess Federation's club register: every registered club has a page with its address, its opening date and the tournaments it is currently running. Tournament rows on chess-results.com add dates, groups and, for many events, the location. The ChessBar and TechMate sites, a Meetup group, the municipality's page for the Chess House and the Lichess coach directory supply the rest.
A club whose register page shows no tournament, and which no other page mentions, stays unconfirmed. Each fact ends in a small number linking to its source, with a short quote in the original language and the day it was read.
Official, secondary, unverified
Official: the page belongs to the place, its organiser, the federation or a public body. Secondary: someone else reports it, such as the tournament server, a directory or the press. Unverified: posted by users, or found in one place only.
The mark says who is speaking, not who is right. A tournament row can carry an old venue, and a club's own page can lag behind what the club actually does.
What usually stays blank
Around Tel Aviv almost no club states when its doors are open, what a visit costs or whether a stranger can come in for a game. Where no page says, the card reads "not stated by sources" rather than inventing an answer from the type of place.
If you know a page that settles one of these questions, send it through the form and the fact will be added with that page as its source.
What the guide does not judge
- No club, bar, coach or event receives a score, a grade or a place in a ranking.
- Cards rest on published pages; nobody visits the venues for the guide.
- Fees are copied from the page that prints them, not checked with the organiser.
- Days and hours come from notices and may change before the card catches up.
- How strong a club is, or how well a coach teaches, is not weighed.
- Accessibility, noise, air conditioning and parking are not checked.
- How many players turn up on a given evening is not counted.
- A blank line means no page answers the question, never that the answer is no.
If a card concerns you
Club officials, organisers, coaches, parents and players can correct any card through the form. A link to a page with the right information makes the change quick to confirm; messages are read together at the next revision.
Every change is dated in guide changes and shown on the card it affects. A club or evening that prefers not to appear can ask for that through the same form, with a reason.
When the pages were read
The pages behind the current cards were read between and . The date beside each source tells how fresh that fact is.
The whole guide is due for a new reading roughly every 6 months. In between, an evening can change bars or a club can stop playing before its card follows. Every revision of the data or of these rules is logged in the guide changes, newest first, and older entries stay as written.
Who is behind it
Tel Aviv Chess is an independent editorial project. It takes no money from clubs, organisers or venues, shows no advertising, and nobody pays to be listed or to be removed.
It exists because chess around Tel Aviv is scattered over a federation register, a tournament server, bar announcements and meetup pages, each showing one piece. Read side by side they show where the game is alive, and the guide keeps that reading in one place with its sources.
Using the data
The full guide can be downloaded as a JSON dataset, one record per place with every source, mark and date. The licence is given inside the file.
A plain-text summary for software and language models sits at llms.txt.
Leads checked and left out
Leads looked at and not listed: 11. Typical reasons are a club in a town beyond Gush Dan, a national championship held once in a university hall, a one-off event without a venue, or a coach who gives no city. The dataset lists every lead with its reason.
Map pins
A card gets a pin only when a source gives a position or when the OpenStreetMap address search finds the building itself. Federation addresses are printed in Hebrew and the search matched few of them, so most cards have no pin.
No pin is placed by hand. The site has no map of its own: the map button opens openstreetmap.org, and positions from OpenStreetMap are credited on the card.